Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor has identified what she calls “the deep inner peace circuitry” of the human brain. She believes that we can tap into that circuitry to transform not only our own conscious state, but the state of the world around us.
I would certainly have to agree with Taylor that our brains can transform the world. Our most recent Better All the Time feature focused on various good news developments having to do with the human brain. The news was all over the map — hope for treating brain cancer, an improved understanding of what a single neuron is capable of doing, thoughts on the proper care and feeding of our brains. All of this is great stuff, to be sure, but I wonder if by looking at individual news items we aren’t missing out on a hugely significant big picture?
The human brain is what brought us down from the trees and into art galleries. It is the reason we can build bridges, compose sonnets, cure diseases. It’s one thing to get all excited about incremental developments in biofuels or LED-based light bulb solutions — and I don’t mean that disparagingly, we should get excited about those things — but any improvement in how we use, care for, or even just understand our brains is good news with a multiplying effect. The human imperative is improvement of the human condition, and the human brain is, well, the brains of that operation. When we make better use of our brains, or care for them better, or understand them better, we are improving our Improvement Machine.
Hydrogen has a long (if somewhat spotted) history of making things go up. For starters, hydrogen gas is lighter than air. In fact, it’s even lighter than helium, which is why — along with a US embargo preventing the German government from getting their hands on sufficient quantities of the inert gas that today we use to lift children’s party balloons and to make our voices squeaky — the ill-fated airship Hindenburg was put aloft by hydrogen gas. Sadly, hydrogen’s extra boost of lift power came with a high level of volatility and flammability, and I think we all know the rest of that story…
But there are other ways that hydrogen can make things fly. For example, Boeing has recently announced that, earlier this year, the aircraft manufacturer demonstrated the first-ever manned flight of an airplane powered entirely by a hydrogen battery. NASA tells us that aircraft account for “up to 4 percent of the annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels near the Earth’s surface as well as at higher altitudes (25,000 to 50,000 feet),” so there is definitely something to be said for airplanes with a carbon footprint of zero. The question is, how close does this initial 20-minute demo flight get us to a future of zero-emission aviation?
Not very, according to Boeing:
The director of the Ocana research centre, Francisco Escarti, said the hydrogen battery “could be the main source of energy for a small plane” but would likely not become the “primary soruce of energy for big passenger planes”.
“The company will continue to explore their potential as well as that of all durable sources of energy that boost environmental performance,” he said.
But Boeing is not the only game in town where hydrogen-powered flight is concerned. As we reported a couple of months ago, the European Space Agency is looking at an idea called LAPCAT (Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie) which promises not only to deliver large-scale, hydrogen-powered commercial aviation, but to return us to the era of supersonic commercial aviation. UK-based Reaction Engines, who have proposed LAPCAT and are currently working with the ESA to study its feasibility, claim that their jet will deliver cruising speeds up to Mach 5, making it possible to fly from Sydney to Brussels in about four hours.
Consider the possibilities: a jet that can fly faster than the Concorde — with a much greater range than Concorde’s, too — which will have none of the Concorde’s negative impact on the atmosphere. Moreover, Reaction Engines claims that the greater range means that LAPCAT will be able to fly routes that can minimize or avoid “supersonic overflight of populated areas.” So we can once again travel faster than sound, this time with less worry about potential resulting noise pollution.
Of course, there’s a hitch to hydrogen-powered aircraft. In fact, it’s the same hitch that you get with hydrogen-powered anything. Hydrogen is a means of transporting energy; it is not itself an energy source — at least not when burned like a conventional fuel. So if we want truly zero-emission aircraft, we need to make sure that whatever is serving up LAPCAT with hydrogen fuel, or charging the batteries of Boeing’s more modest offering, is itself a green and emission-free energy source. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric would all be good ways to produce energy for zero-emission aviation. But if we were to look to look to a future in which all aviation becomes zero-emission, we will need something more scalable and reliable than any of those.
For the near- to mid-term, that probably means nuclear energy. For the longer term, fusion energy will eventually supply us with cheap and abundant power without the risks or drawbacks associated with nuclear fission reactors. (Although it’s important to note that those risks and drawbacks have been considerably reduced in the more recent versions of nuclear fission reactors, which has significantly broadened the appeal of these low-emission power plants.) Mimicking the process by which the sun itself is powered, fusion is perhaps the ultimate natural energy source. And it’s fueled by hydrogen — meaning that a future of zero-emission aviation may be hydrogen-powered in more ways than one.
Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes
Type 2 impossibilities
Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes
Type 3 impossibilties
Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition
Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we’ll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.
Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes
Type 2 impossibilities
Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes
Type 3 impossibilties
Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition
Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we’ll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.
Posted by Sir Richard Branson, President and Founder of Virgin Group
In my life, I’ve had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I’m delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.
Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.
With so much futurific goodness to get through in 60 short minutes, we probably won’t have time for a “Tales of the Paranormal” segment on this week’s FFR, so I wanted to share this video (hat-tip: Harvey) of an earnest young man articulating his views on ex-tra-terr-est-ri-als.
With so much futurific goodness to get through in 60 short minutes, we probably won’t have time for a “Tales of the Paranormal” segment on this week’s FFR, so I wanted to share this video (hat-tip: Harvey) of an earnest young man articulating his views on ex-tra-terr-est-ri-als.
Following up on a discussion we had on FFR a couple of weeks ago, I wrote recently on the subject of technology relinquishment, exploring the question of whether technology adoption has been forced upon those who don’t want it and whether this will continue to be the case. I believe that we, as a society, make some accommodation to those who don’t want to accept new technologies, and that we are perhaps a bit more tolerant of those who seem to reject new technologies along a nice clean break line, what I described as a “plateau of completeness.”
The standard example is the Amish, who see the world as being pretty much technology sufficient as of the 18th century — no new developments sought or required. I also suggested that human augmentation technologies might be another coming break line, and that non-augmented humanity will be the Amish of the age of augmentation.
Another example of a technology that seems to represent some kind of break line is genetically modified foods. (I don’t suppose I need to reiterate my own views on what relinquishment of this articular technological development means.) What’s interesting about the relinquishment of this technology is that many people who are doing without this development –who would probably want it f given a clear choice in the matter — have no say in the decision to reject it.
In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,†President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.â€
Rejecting GM crop technology in the form of food aid is only a small part of the problem, however. The real damage is done by the fact that growing GM crops is banned throughout almost all of Africa by authoritarian African governments, acting in collusion with Western governments and NGOs. Regressive agricultural standards and practices in Africa are driven by a romanticized Western idea of what “natural” farming should be about — forcing Africans to struggle to feed themselves while the rest of the world benefits from the technological developments we deny them. Robert Paarlberg describes life on the typical African farm:
It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.
This goes well beyond genetically modified crops. Basically, African have been denied access to almost all major advances in agricultural production from the past century or so. In our discussion of technology relinquishment on FFR, we were all quick to agree that it would be wrong to force iPods and Priuses on the Amish. No one should be required to adopt a technology they don’t want. But what are we to make of governments and other groups who force others not to use technology that they might want and would almost certainly benefit from?
The hypocrisy of Western organizations — coming from countries whose economies have benefited tremendously from these developments — is palpable. Read the entire article, which ends on the hopeful note that at least one Western group is trying to make inroads on introducing drought-resistant crops into Africa. That alone would be an enormous step forward.
Apparently, Edison wasn’t first. You can go here to listen to a woman singing a French folk song, recorded in 1860 — a full 17 ears before Edison’s first audio recording. The recording technology employed was crude to say the least. Apparently there wasn’t even an option for playback:
American audio historian David Giovannoni recently discovered a phonautogram, captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves, the Associated Press reports. The phonautograph could not play them back.
De Martinville was quite a visionary: recording sounds in anticipation of a future in which the technology would exist to play them back. And here we are, nearly 150 years later, living in that future.
When you think about it, that’s a pretty modest title. “Controlling the galaxy” just sounds a lot folksier than “ruling the universe,” doesn’t it?”
Anyway, seeing as I expect that most of the galaxy will be explored by self-replicating probes while I’m off on my retirement cruise, this topic is of personal interest to me. Of course, if technology advances the way it ought to, and no retirement cruise is necessary, I hope to participate in the exploration and settlement of the galaxy in uploaded form. That would fall under item 4 on George’s list:
1. Exploration
2. Communication
3. Working
4. Colonization
5. Uplifting
6. Berserking
7. Policing
This is good reading, especially the analysis of that nagging question “Where are all the probes?”
